Thursday, September 14, 2006

LATEX, written as LaTeX in plain text, is a document preparation system for the (TeX) typesetting program. It is used mainly by mathematicians, scientists, and engineers in academia. It is also widely used by people outside of these fields as a primary or intermediate format (e.g. translating DocBook and other XML-based formats to PDF) due to the quality of typesetting achieved by TeX.It offers programmable desktop publishing features and extensive facilities for automating most aspects of typesetting and desktop publishing, including numbering and cross-referencing, tables and figures, page layout, bibliographies, and much more. LaTeX was originally written in 1984 by Leslie Lamport and has become the dominant method for using TeX—few people write in (plain TeX) anymore. The current version is (LaTeX2e). Both LaTeX and TeX are free software.LaTeX is usually pronounced [ˈleɪ.tɛx] or [ˈlɑ.tɛx] (that is, not with the [ks] pronunciation English speakers normally associate with X). The last character in the name comes from a capital χ (chi), as the name of TeX derives from the Greek τέχνη (skill, art, technique). While TeX's creator Donald Knuth promoted the /tɛx/ pronunciation, Lamport has said he does not favor or deprecate any pronunciation for LaTeX. It is traditionally printed with the special typographical logo shown on this page. In media where the logo cannot be precisely reproduced in running text, the word is typically given the unique capitalization LaTeX to avoid confusion with the word “latex”.